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String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

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Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#901

Post by close04 »

IshKebab wrote: post #834
tacitusarc wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, the trolley problem is decided every day, and humanity does not change tracks. There are people who die waiting for organ donors, and a single donor could match multiple people. We do not find an appropriate donor and harvest them. This is the trolley problem, applied.

> We do not find an appropriate donor and harvest them. This is the trolley problem, applied. I don't think that matches the trolley problem particularly well for all sorts of reasons. But anyway your point is irrelevant - his claim was that the trolley problem isn't about real humans, not that people would pull the lever. Edit: never mind, I reread your comment and I think you were also agreeing with that.

> his claim was that the trolley problem isn't about real humans

Is it though? Let's look at the comment [0] written 8h before your reply:

> the trolley problem isn’t really about real humans in that situation

As in "don't take things absolutely literally like you were doing, because you'll absolutely be wrong". You found a way to compound the mistake by dropping the critical information then taking absolutely literally what was left.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907977

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#902

Post by close04 »

bee_rider wrote: post #794
tacitusarc wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, the trolley problem is decided every day, and humanity does not change tracks. There are people who die waiting for organ donors, and a single donor could match multiple people. We do not find an appropriate donor and harvest them. This is the trolley problem, applied.

Yea, it doesn’t seem quite right to say that the trolley problem isn’t about really people. I mean the physical mechanical system isn’t there but it is a direct abstraction of decisions we make every day.

> the trolley problem isn’t about really people

My actual words quoted below give one extra detail that makes all the difference, one that I see people silently dropped in a rush to reply. The words were aimed at someone taking these problems in a too literal sense, as extra evidence that they are not to be taken as such but as food for though that has real life applicability.

> the trolley problem isn’t really about real humans in that situation

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#903

Post by close04 »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #856
bee_rider wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scenario is set up by an evil philosopher though, so they can tie up the people arbitrarily close to the split in the rails, such that your solution doesn’t work, right?

In this case, it won’t matter, I’m afraid, which way the trolley goes as it will at least mangle both groups of people, and the only winning move is to try to move as many people as possible away from the track. An Eastern European solution is to get a few buddies to cut the electrical wire that powers the trolleys and sell it for scrap metal, which works on all electrical trolleys. (After the trolley stops, it can b…

> An Eastern European solution

Made me chuckle. Funny 'cause it's true. About the trolley problem, if taken literally (people on tracks, etc.) pulling the lever exposes you to liability: you operated a mechanism you weren't authorized to use and for which you had no prior training, and you decided to kill one innocent person that was previously safe from harm.

Giving CPR is a very tame/safe version of the trolley problem and in some countries you're still liable for what happens after if you do it. Same when donating food to someone who might starve. Giving help has become a very spiny issue. But consciously harming someone when giving help in real life is a real minefield.

P.S. These philosophical problems are meant to force a decision from the options given. So assume the the problem is just a multiple choice one, 2 answers. You don't get to write a third.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#904

Post by lazide »

xyzzy9563 wrote: post #758
emmelaich wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G.K.Chesterton knew it, 100 years ago: "... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."

This sounds a lot like the psychopath Anton Chigurh in the movie No Country for Old Men . His view of the world is he is the arbiter of people's destiny, which often involves them being murdered.

I mean, if you’ve got murdering to do, those do sound like useful traits to have.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#905

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

close04 wrote: post #903
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, it won’t matter, I’m afraid, which way the trolley goes as it will at least mangle both groups of people, and the only winning move is to try to move as many people as possible away from the track. An Eastern European solution is to get a few buddies to cut the electrical wire that powers the trolleys and sell it for scrap metal, which works on all electrical trolleys. (After the trolley stops, it can b…

> An Eastern European solution Made me chuckle. Funny 'cause it's true. About the trolley problem, if taken literally (people on tracks, etc.) pulling the lever exposes you to liability: you operated a mechanism you weren't authorized to use and for which you had no prior training, and you decided to kill one innocent person that was previously safe from harm. Giving CPR is a very tame/safe version of the trolley pro…

> P.S. These philosophical problems are meant to force a decision from the options given. So assume the the problem is just a multiple choice one, 2 answers. You don't get to write a third.

I know about it. And yet I refuse to play the game. The problem is that even philosophers should be able to acknowledge that in the real universe, no box should be too big to prevent from thinking outside of it.

Otherwise we get people who conflate map with the territory, like what this whole comment thread is about.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#906

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

infBIGlilnums wrote: post #804
rachofsunshine wrote: post #149

[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some…

Ok but social clustering is how humans work. Culture translated to modern idiomatic language is “practice of a cult”. Ure translates to “practice of”, Ur being the first city so say historians; clusters of shared culture is our lived experience. Forever now there have been a statistical few who get stuck in a while loop “while alive recite this honorific code, kill perceived threats to memorized honorific chants”. We…

> Culture translated to modern idiomatic language is “practice of a cult”. Ure translates to “practice of”, Ur being the first city so say historians

Excuse me but what in the name of ever-loving fuck did I just read.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#907

Post by card_zero »

sunshowers wrote: post #619
card_zero wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to go like this: Compatibilists: free will is a term for something real that we do. Incompatibilists: no, that thing is trivial and should have a different name. Free will is a term for something impossible. But despite being impossible it's a meaningful concept. And it's somehow hugely important and deserves a name. I'm unclear about the motivation for this, especially the last part.

My specific issue is with moral responsibility, which I believe is out of one's control. (So for example I don't think developers are to morally blame for writing bad code.)

Blame is a messy idea. I'm big on morality, it's how we know what to do next - what we should do, and "should" is a word indicating that a moral idea follows. Without morality I'd be (even more) like a sessile sponge, incapable of action. "Why bother?" is a moral question.

So one can say "I should do XYZ", but this soon descends into blame: "hey you, why didn't you do XYZ?", and that can be mean-spirited recrimination to do with bullying and social pressure, coercion and guilt and labelling people as no good, and main function of the question might not be to seek an answer.

Or, more rarely, it might be an honest enquiry into philosophical differences, or practical problems. Developers shouldn't write bad code. But they do, so we can "blame" them for it. That doesn't mean we should hurl rotten vegetables at most of them. On Wikipedia, I routinely blame people for fucking up an article, but the objective isn't to make them feel bad, it's to fix the article (and to check their reasons, to make sure that I'm not the one with the bad idea). Blame is one thing, but what to do with blame is a separate question.

It's definitely about the way people function, though, about enquiring into their mistakes and motivations. They have "responsibility" in the sense of being expected to respond to "why did you do XYZ?", and even if the answer is "it was inevitable because of the way I am", there's still more practical aspects of the answer ("because I was sleepy, because I was trying to avoid PQR, because I like XYZ") in which to seek knowledge. If we're all autonoma, so what: these autonoma want to solve moral problems.

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#908

Post by squigz »

Aurornis wrote: post #751
hackandthink wrote: post #743

On the fringes of the rationalist community, there are obviously questionable figures who may be playing an evil game (Bankman Fried) or have lost their way intellectually and morally. My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

> My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. The rationalist bloggers are very good at optics and carefully distance themselves from the fringes at the surface. They have a somewhat circular definition of rationalism that defines rationalists as being reasonable, which makes it easy to cr…

Reading a couple SSC posts for the first time here myself, so my impression is fairly limited, but it sounds like you might be blaming SSC unfairly for simply intellectually engaging with reactionary ideas, which I can't fault someone for, and nor should you.

Can you link to some specific examples which more explicitly have the "What if they're right?" subtext you're referring to?

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#909

Post by squigz »

zozbot234 wrote: post #771
Aurornis wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My impression from occasional visits to astral codex ten, however, is that the vast majority of people are reasonable and sometimes succeed to make the world a better place. The rationalist bloggers are very good at optics and carefully distance themselves from the fringes at the surface. They have a somewhat circular definition of rationalism that defines rationalists as being reasonable, which makes it easy to cr…

Slate Star Codex's engagement with neoreactionary thought is not exactly a secret. He wrote both "Reactionary philosophy in an enormous, planet-sized nutshell" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy... (a sympathetic treatment of these ideas) and "The Anti-Reactionary FAQ" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f... There's also plenty of good reasons to be aware of these pol…

That FAQ was a long and interesting read. Thanks for sharing!

Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'

#910

Post by brookst »

adastra22 wrote: post #827
brookst wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language evolves. Saying that today’s conservatives are not true conservatives is the literal definition of the no true Scotsman fallacy.

It's like the distinction between "liberal" and "liberalism." The former being a dirty slur word in American politics, and the latter being an entire field of economic and political philosophy dating back to the enlightenment. The latter definition is still in use among the educated. So too, with "conservative," at least outside of your American news bubble.

I don’t view American news, but thanks for the condescension.

Arguing for an academic definition as somehow true and absolute, in contradiction to common usage, is a lost cause. Language prescriptivists always lose in the long run.

In the US, classical liberalism is largely despised by the same people who despise political liberalism. Funnily enough, those people are conservatives by either definition.

It’s unfortunate that academic conservatism keeps turning into real world populism (and certainly classical liberalism has seen that as well). But language evolves, and it’s n order to be able to communicate, terminology must as well.

It’s just a word. Words change. There’s no reason to defend an archaic meaning when it’s just going to cause confusion in almost every context.

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